1 min read

Getting water out of the speakers of an iPhone quickly

This morning I was listening to a podcast on my phone as I was getting ready for work, and I splashed a large amount of water on my phone. I freaked out for a second before I realized that my phone is waterproof. Once I realized this, I resumed the playback of my podcast, but I could barely hear it, and the sound was extremely distorted. I quickly realized that this was because my phone speakers were drenched. It was at this time I thought of two solutions:

  1. Turn the podcast off, continue getting ready for my day, wait for the speakers to dry, and generally act like a reasonable and patient adult.
  2. Find a way to eject the water from the speakers quickly, so I could resume listening.

I decided to go with option 2. I remembered reading that the Apple watch plays a specific tone when ejecting water from itself, so I decided to look for an app that could do something similar and found Sonic. Sonic is a free app that can generate a single tone, and lets you choose the specific frequency of the tone

I looked up to see if anyone else had tried something like this, and the conventional wisdom seemed to be 160Hz was a good target frequency. I selected 160Hz, turned the volume on my phone all the way up, and clicked the Play button. I then let me phone sit face down for a few seconds on the table and BAM, I had a working speaker again after a relatively short amount of time.